[Air-l] The History of that "Other" Internet: PLATO

[Brian Dear]

The current AoIR thread on the history (or histories) of the Internet is 
interesting.   I couldn't resist mentioning a project I'm working on that 
is at the same time related and unrelated.

I'm writing a book on the history of  "another" internet, one that 
developed independently of, and parallel to, the ARPAnet back in the 60s, 
70s, and 80s: the PLATO network.  Ironically, it was funded by the same 
agencies: ARPA, ONR, NSF.   Incredibly, its actual history, significance, 
and massive influence are for all intents and purposes, completely unknown 
to most people.

For a while in the 70s, the PLATO network was larger, in terms of number of 
actual users, than the ARPAnet.   And during that same while, and arguably 
for some time thereafter, PLATO was more advanced than the ARPAnet and 
offered capabilities some of which would not appear on the Internet for 10 
to 15 more years.   It's as if PLATO was this separate species, developing 
in a heretofore unknown geographical region, that catapulted up the 
food-chain in a remarkably fast way, only to die out just as remarkably 
quickly.   Survival of the fittest, or luckiest?   One question I'm 
investigating.

During the 1970s, PLATO developed at a tremendously accelerated pace, 
something we would not see until the late 80s, early 90s on the 
Internet.   Every day on PLATO, new tools and new applications would 
appear: many originated by the PLATO systems staff, but many more by the 
user community itself.  PLATO's programming language, called TUTOR, was 
designed for people to create computer-assisted instruction lessons, but 
the prevailing philosophy on PLATO, one of "anything goes" and "be 
flexible, you never know what the needs of the next developer will be" were 
such that TUTOR became extremely open-ended and well-documented, enabling 
mere mortals to develop all kinds of things the PLATO creators had never 
envisioned: games, simulations, multiuser communication and collaboration 
tools, text editors, scientific applications, interfaces to all kinds of 
different hardware devices, etc.

The result was -- nearly overnight -- a rich, vibrant online community, 
remarkably similar to online communities that would pop up everywhere over 
the ensuing decades.   The PLATO system, while mainframe-based, was viewed 
by its users as a very "personal" computer in the sense of "a tool that 
lets you communicate and collaborate with other people".   Sun Microsystems 
would grasp the notion (with its "the network is the computer" slogan) 
early in the 80s, but this was not a common conception in the 1970s --- to 
Apple and Microsoft, for example, "PC" would for many years simply signify 
"personal desktop machine to do my number-crunching, document-preparation, 
and BASIC programming".

Many who came into contact with PLATO in the 1970s would have their lives 
and careers permanently altered by the experience, and by the realization 
of what computer networks really implied about the future of daily 
life.   PLATO people were in the 1970s already living the always-on, 
always-accessible "digital lifestyle" that has only recently become 
commonplace.  You didn't "use" PLATO, you "lived" PLATO.   Lotus Notes (a 
product designed for office-workers to "live" in all day long) is but one 
case of a technology that came about precisely because its inventors, Ray 
Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen, and Len Kawell, had previously been exposed to and 
immersed in the PLATO system -- and the PLATO Notes application, among 
others -- while students at the University of Illinois.

The PLATO culture is a fascinating microcosm of and precursor to today's 
Internet, both socially and technically.   Study the PLATO world of the 
1970s and you find issues ranging from the Hacker Ethic to free speech and 
government censorship; from open-source arguments to security and privacy 
concerns; from online collaboration to blog-like multi-user content 
management systems; from the evolution of chat and email to the rise of 
graphical-smileys and "emoticons"; from message forums on thousands of 
subjects, years before Usenet, to the dawn of MUDs and massively 
multiplayer games; from multimedia to complex scientific simulations; from 
online dating, relationship counseling, romances, and marriages to 
stalking, divorces, suicides....  You name it, and it happened on PLATO, 
during the same era where Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Case, and Scott 
McNeally were still all in high school, and Nixon was still president.

Is all this significant?  Should we care?  Absolutely it's 
significant.  Absolutely we should care.

It's my hope that by writing this book on the history of PLATO two things 
will happen: 1) a huge gaping hole in the history of the Information Age 
will finally be at least a tiny bit "plugged", and 2) we will understand 
and appreciate the Internet, the Web, AOL, and Cyber-culture in general in 
new and much richer ways.    After all, it turns out that much of what 
happened on the Internet already had happened -- a long time ago, in a 
cyberspace far, far away.   Why that is so, how that came to be, and why 
the Internet "won" and PLATO "lost" are three major questions I hope to 
answer in this book.   I welcome your thoughts, questions, and ideas.

- Brian

Brian Dear
PLATO History Project
La Jolla, CA
brian at platopeople.com
http://www.platopeople.com